(upbeat music)
- Hello, everyone, welcome to the start of new Vlog
here in very very sunny Spain today.
I have some exciting news from the Spanish lockdown
and that is that from tomorrow I'm pretty sure
adults are gonna be allowed to go out for walks
just like being out for exercise
which hasn't been a thing that's been allowed for the past,
I don't know, seven, eight weeks,
however long this lockdown's been.
Recently they sort of loosened it for kids
so that they could get out and about and like,
you know, blow off steam
'cause I'm sure all their parents were going nuts
tryna, you know, entertain their kids inside apartments.
But now, adults are allowed out for walks too.
I'm very excited, I'm planning on going for a nice long walk
down the Jardines Del Turia.
I don't know if I pronounced that right.
Please don't make fun of my pronunciation.
This weekend, which is like a sunken park
that runs through the city
that used to be a river running through
and they like drained it or blocked it off or whatever
and now it's a beautiful park,
which is where I love to go walk.
And yeah, it is calling my name.
I'm very excited.
I'm structuring my day a little bit differently today.
I did my workout earlier in the morning,
rather than doing it around noon, which is my usual.
I don't know why, I just felt like it today
but I did my usual catch up.
Didn't take long this morning because I was actually online
until probably like, I don't know,
quarter past 10 last night.
I appeared on The Future Belongs to Creators podcast,
which is a live streamed daily show that Nathan and Barrett,
our CEO and COO, that's hard to say,
started when this whole pandemic sort of started,
it's a way to sort of channel
some anxious energy into creating
and yeah, they've been making amazing episodes
and keeping up with a schedule, which is super impressive.
And I was a guest last night on the livestream,
which was really fun.
We talked about getting hate and unwanted attention
as a creator, as a female creator in particular.
It was a really good conversation,
I was happy to have had the space to talk about it.
So if you wanna watch the replay of that,
then I will leave a link to it on a card
and also in the description.
Before we get further into today's vlog though,
I have some exciting news
and to, like, show you it, I'm gonna roll my intro.
Did you notice the little powered by Figma?
That's new.
It's very exciting.
This channel is now sponsored by Figma.
They've come on board to partner with me
in making more videos and basically just be there
to support kind of like a patron would.
Usually when a YouTuber does a sponsored video,
it's kind of like the brand pays for you to promote them
and you have a key message to communicate
and like the whole video is about the brand
and they sign it off that sort of thing.
That's not what's happening here.
Figma just wanna support my channel
and wanna partner with me on it
'cause they like what I'm doing here, which is great.
I still have complete creative control
over how many videos I make,
what I make videos about, what I say in those videos.
They're not signing off or anything like that.
They're just happy to be here supporting.
So that's wonderful, I really appreciate it.
And I think it's a perfect fit,
because I use Figma pretty much every single day
for both my work and my side hustles.
If you haven't heard me talk about it before,
it's my design tool of choice.
So it's what I use to design any website that I work on
to create any sort of digital graphic that I'm working on
Figma is what I use for that.
So it's a great fit.
I'm really excited to have them as a sponsor
and I hope that you're excited about that, too.
I'm so happy that they wanted to come on board
and support in this way, because I much prefer it to
doing a one off sponsorship here and there.
It's just nice to have a brand
that I know I'm gonna be partnered with.
We're both aligned in our missions,
in supporting designers in this case,
and yeah, it's very exciting.
So huge thank you to Figma,
let's just give them a round of applause
for choosing to support a creator in this way.
And if you've not tried Figma yet,
then there'll always be a link now
in the description of my videos
for the duration of our partnership.
So you can always head down there and and try it out
and speaking of Figma,
today I think the main thing I'll be showing you
in this video
is preparing the homepage for development.
This homepage that I've been talking about in vlogs
for like, I feel like the whole of this lockdown vlog series
is finally, I finished the design.
I'm gonna say finished, because I don't know,
inevitably next week I might think about something
and like wanna tweak it a little bit, I don't know.
But I'm gonna try and say that it's finished now.
So I've got to prepare the files,
make sure everything is like documented
that needs to be turned over to Corey
to export all the assets.
And so yeah, I'll show you my, like, process
so I guess let's get on to doing that with some coffee.
And let's get the workday started.
Also, I feel the need to confess
that this is an espresso lungo.
Sorry to all the coffee snobs out there.
I usually am a person who grinds my own beans
and makes my espresso
but some days you just wanna, like, put a thing in a machine
and let the machine make the coffee for you.
(upbeat music)
So one thing that I'm doing as I'm going through
and I'm getting this homepage ready for build,
now is when I start to take a look at all of the assets
that I've created for the page and perfect them in a way.
I don't, like, care about being pixel perfect
at all when I'm designing.
But when I'm exporting an asset, when it's the final thing
that's gonna be uploaded to the site,
that is when I wanna make sure I get it right.
So for example, by the way, this is the homepage,
let me turn the guides off and show you.
This is the design I've got so far.
So this right here is actually gonna be the animation
that you saw me create a few vlogs ago,
that's gonna go in here,
where it's like a blob and then morphs into a landing page,
I don't know,
you can go back and watch that if you're interested
then we come down the page
and we're featuring a few creators,
there's like a tiny little case study about them.
And a little quote from them,
and also showcasing one of their landing pages
for each creator, which is cool.
Then there's this section here,
which talks about our product.
I think it was the last vlog that I was working on this,
this is what I've settled on.
Is having them with a little blob background
instead of the rectangle
that I think you saw in that video.
And then we come into this call to action,
it shows a hint of our landing page template gallery,
which I really like,
'cause it's sort of like foreshadowing what you'll see
once you click on this button here
and go like into our call to action.
And then here we just have like some of the latest content.
The purpose of this is to be automatically updated
whenever there's a new guide, a new workshop,
a new tip video or whatever.
So yeah, this is what we've got for the homepage
and I also took the time to update the footer as well.
So we've got this beautiful graphic now.
Oops, I just realized my, what was cutting this off.
But yeah, and I wanted to include this in our footer.
So I just did a bit of rearranging
some new information architecture there.
and then I also have it laid out,
I tend to hand over three breakpoints.
So this is like desktop view,
vertical iPad view, and then mobile view.
So anyway, that's a look at what our homepage is doing.
And right now I'm just going through and perfecting details,
I've talked to Corey about how he wants
to handle these assets.
He thinks he's gonna put a JPEG in like an SVG frame.
And so these are the JPEGs at the side here
that I've exported for him.
And I'm just coming in
and fixing up these little landing page bits
because like this one is 310 high and 224 pixels wide,
but this one is 308 wide and 230 high.
So I wanna get them, I don't know, you know,
as I was designing it, I just sort of placed it by eye
and obviously my eye is not pixel perfect,
and so I wanna get these a little more accurate.
I always export everything,
just using the little export thing here in Figma as well.
I export it as at 2X
because I like to make things good for a retina screen.
But then I use a tool called image optim
to compress everything.
So that's what we're doing is tidying these up,
exporting and compressing them in image optim
so we get the file size as small as possible
without losing too much quality.
(upbeat music)
Just finished eating my lunch outside,
it's a beautiful blue sky, sunny day today.
Now I'm having a second coffee for the day,
I don't always do this,
but some days I'm just feeling really tired.
I want a pick me up for the afternoon
to help me keep powering through.
Wow, someone's having fun outside.
Okay, let me show you
my hand over to Corey for the homepage,
just to get an idea of what I do for that.
Can you hear that helicopter in the background?
They fly around and sometimes there's like a message
playing over a loudspeaker,
which I can't really understand because it's in Spanish,
and it's like, you know,
gobbled by being over a megaphone.
But apparently they're, like, warning people to stay apart.
I don't know, it's been happening a lot.
Let's go into GitHub.
So for every time that I do a handover to Corey
for a project, when it's like a big one like this,
and it's not just like a small fix on the site or whatever.
I create an issue in GitHub for it, so here's what we got.
In the issue, I've put a link to the Figma file,
a link to the folder in Dropbox
where I've exported the assets,
and then made a couple of notes
about things to watch out for here.
And also some things that I like
I anticipate this taking a longer time,
so we could possibly do this build in two phases.
Over in Figma, though, in my file,
it's kind of weird that I'm doing this
holding my vlog camera up to the screen,
but hey, this is the vlog this is what we got.
I have these pages in every design project that I do,
where first of all,
I'm working through the wire frames of a project,
figure out the basic structure of the page,
then I move on to doing the actual design
and wow, there was a lot of versions
for this particular project.
And then because like handing Corey this, is a nightmare,
but I don't wanna get rid of all this stuff.
There's some good ideas explored
in some of these past versions
that I want to make sure we're keeping, I don't know,
I just never wanna delete all my working files.
So I make a separate page called, To Build,
where I just put the very final version.
So this is the homepage on desktop,
the tablet size breakpoint and mobile breakpoint
marked up so Corey can see what I'm thinking
will shift at each point.
And then if I turn on comments,
I left a bunch of comments in here too,
about various things that he should note
stuff about the sizing of the images,
then to the side here I've got the SVG shapes
that he'll need to put these JPEGs into the frame.
Our next step will be to have a meeting to go over this.
We don't necessarily do a project kickoff meeting
for every project.
But this is a pretty big one.
So it warrants some time,
we have the standing meetings on our calendar,
one at the start of the week, which is like a quick check in
of what we're gonna do for the week.
And then one usually on Fridays, which is a longer meeting
where we can dive into project details,
doing a review, talking about plans
or in this case going over a new build
and pointing out things that he needs to be aware of.
He can ask me any questions about functionality,
things like that.
We shifted that to next Monday though,
so that won't actually happen today.
But I'm more ready for it when it does happen.
Feels really good
to finally be at the stage of the homepage,
I'm really proud of it,
I think it's going to be a little different
to a lot of other sass company home pages,
which is like not always, like, my main goal or anything.
I think that sometimes designs end up looking very similar
for a reason and that's because that particular structure
is like a good design and it functions well
and it gets information across well,
that's why we often end up with big photo headers
and things like that.
Because it's impactful when you first come to the site.
But I'm excited to be trying something new with this.
I feel like it's a good like move forward for our brand
and definitely a good move forward for my skills too
with the work that I did to create the animation
that's gonna go on this page.
So yeah, feeling good about it, even though this project
is taking way longer than it should have
likely due to my general brain fog and like, you know,
the lack of inspiration brought on by the quarantine.
So I guess that's why it feels extra good
to be at this point of this project
compared to any other that I've had recently.
This was my main work for the day.
But now I'm gonna move on to just doing few bits and pieces
to close the week out on a good note.
I've been writing an article for a blog,
I need to make some edits to that.
I've been working on a new template gallery
for the marketing site showcasing landing page templates.
So I guess I'm gonna just, like, dive in
and try and keep this, like, accomplished feeling going.
(upbeat music)
All right, it is like five o'clock
and I'm done with work for the day
and so my first priority right now is
beer.
Mark and I did an order from All Hops
which is our favorite bar here in Valencia
and ordered a bunch of craft beers.
This is a sour cherry.
So let's crack into this, finish it outside
and play a little Animal Crossing.
Seems like a good way to end off a work day on a Friday.
(upbeat music)
All right, I'm gonna end the vlog here for today.
Thank you for watching it.
I hope you enjoyed seeing that finished homepage
and what I do to prepare a design to be developed
and handed off to Corey.
I am excited for the weekend,
I feel like I'm in need of some good R&R time,
you know, just some more sleep that's for sure.
I feel very tired today
and lots more time playing Animal Crossing as well.
That's my plan for the weekend,
as well as editing this vlog.
I wanna say a huge thank you again to Figma
for coming in as a partner in my YouTube channel.
I'm just very grateful for that
and excited to be working with them.
So yeah, thank you for watching as well.
I always appreciate your support
and it means a lot to me to get comments
and to just have you watching
and hanging out with me in these vlogs
so thank you for being here.
Hope you have a good weekend too.
Do something creative, do something relaxing,
whatever you wanna fill that time with.
Alright, thanks for watching
and I'll see you in the next vlog.
Bye.
(upbeat music)